MacBook Air Positioned as Apple’s New Flagship Mac

The MacBook is Apple’s past and the MacBook Air is its future. This truism couldn’t be more evident than with the recent updates going into the next iteration of the company’s ultimate Mac computer expected to run the next generation Mac operating system, the OS X Lion.

Industry pundits have observed that the Cupertino company has ordered about 400,000 MacBook Airs running Intel’s Sandy Bridge CPU architecture and is slated to start production this month (June) if recent analyst reports are to be believed. More than half of these will come in the more popular 11.6-inch screens, the rest in the 13-inch model. They are expected to meet market expectations for amore friendly price point that its original MacBook Air carried.

Reviews and market interests on the new generation MacBook Air seem to indicate that Apple in on the right path with the just the right price points. The 11.6 inch model is priced at an entry level $900, matching Apple’s cheapest MacBook. If that’s any indication, the future for Apple has certainly looked brighter than it ever did with the MacBook air perceived as the right hardware for its upcoming OS X Lion and the announced iCloud computing universe as revealed in the recently concluded WWDC event

Once the new MacBook Air comes to market, expect to see Core i-series processors to improve that would usher in more powerful MacBooks as the current Intel Core 2 Duo chips are a couple of CPU generations behind. You can also expect the introduction of Thunderbolt ports which would open third party storage drive makers to make compatible products and mitigate concerns about storage limitations. Apple has earlier made improvements to the read/write speeds of its Solid State Storage drives in the MacBook Air and might boost their base storage space at around this time.

It is no secret that the MacBook Air shares more affinity with the iPad than previous Mac computers and as such, the two makes a perfect couple to run the iOS-inspired Lion iteration of the OS X. Conventional hard drives won’t really bring the full potential of the OS X when it is designed to suit the MacBook Air. That seems to be in Apple’s scheme of things and in two years time, could be less, when anyone says “Mac” you would be thinking MacBook Air. In the world of personal computing, what Apple says, often becomes carved in stone.

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